Created Equal
by Saucery
Summary: Sam reflects on what he cannot have. Dean/Castiel, Sam/Jessica and hints of unrequited Sam/Dean. Set shortly before the end of season 5.


**Created Equal**

* * *

It's not like Sam doesn't know what they're doing, but he pretends _not_ to know, because they're the Winchester clan and it's the closest fucking thing to the army outside of the army, and you don't ask and you don't tell. But you can _know_, and Sam knows, and acts like it doesn't make him feel stung and strangely heartsore that someone else believes in Dean more than Sam does, now, and that Dean believes in someone else, too. The way he no longer does in Sam.

Dean believes in Castiel. It's painfully _obvious_, even above and beyond the perfectly run-of-the-mill way in which Sam believes in Cas, because Castiel's an angel and not one of the dickish ones, either - he's _their_ angel, the one that watches over them, that scribbles goddamn Enochian on their _ribs_ to keep them safe. Or, well, he's actually Dean's angel, specifically, not Sam's - Sam's just the collateral - but still, he's saved both of their asses plenty of times already, and Sam's not going to begrudge him a little slice of heaven here on earth, if Dean's what Cas thinks heaven is.

He can't blame Cas for thinking that way. When Dean believes in you, it's like being in the _sun_, enveloped and warm and lit from within, and it's. It's frighteningly and shatteringly addictive. Except that it's Cas Dean believes in, now. Castiel wasn't having it off with demons while Dean was rotting in hell; Castiel was fighting to get him _out_. While Sam was _failing_ - while Sam was -

Sam knows he doesn't have the right to comment on other people's choices in sexual partners. Romantic partners. Whatever. Not after what he's done. Once upon a time (ha!), he used to feel a sick, hatefully smug sense of superiority that he'd only felt vaguely guilty about, and what did the Bible say about pride, again? Came before a fall, didn't it? Because Sam _had_ been proud of himself - vain, even. Dean was the manwhore, the one that fucked the skankiest skanks from every diner, depot or laundromat he happened to walk into, and _Sam_ was the good son, the decent man with the proper girlfriend, the one that managed to have and keep a girl like Jess, golden within and without, voice sweet and heart sweeter, and he'd loved her and been proud of her and _because_ of her, and then she'd died. Because of Sam. Just like Dean had, but Dean had come _back_, believing in someone else, and wouldn't Jess have believed in someone else, too, if she'd come back? Does she believe in Sam now, where she is, in heaven? Not after all the things she must've seen Sam do, anyhow. Maybe she's found an angel of her own to believe in. And the damnedest thing is, Sam _wants_ her to have found someone else. Someone who actually _deserves_ her faith - who looks at her like Cas looks at Dean, as if they'd give up heaven for her, and hey, look, Cas actually _did_ give it all up. For Dean. Sam couldn't even give up his measly little life on _earth_.

Sam doesn't think about what they do together, Cas and Dean, because that's - freaky and wrong is what it is, Sammy, Jesus. (His mind _sounds_ like Dean, sometimes.) Sam doesn't think about it, just leaves the motel most nights, not to find demon-blood to drink but just to go out and have a beer or something, maybe go down to the local Ghostbusters hotspot to see if he can scrounge up some ghoulish evidence of the coming Apocalypse, or maybe ice some Black Eyed Peas the good old-fashioned way, without his powers. And when he comes back, a couple of hours later, he finds Dean clean and bathed and asleep, looking relieved and restful and almost _happy_, and Sam pretends that he doesn't know why Dean waited until Sam had left to have a shower, or why he looks so sated now, or who he might be seeing and talking to in his dreams that might've been here just earlier, holding onto Dean's shoulders like they were something precious, smoothing a palm over that _mark_, claiming Dean again, tasting Dean's mouth, fucking him.

Sam doesn't. He doesn't think about it.

And he doesn't mean to see it, either - he _doesn't_, any more than he'd meant to catch Dean making out with that hot little cheerleader back in tenth grade, when Sam had honest-to-God just gotten up for a glass of water, and had ended up nearly walking in on Dean fucking that girl, right there on the living room _couch_, skirt rucked up around her hips and Dean's hands as dark as brands on the impossibly soft skin of her ass, creamy-white and flawless as marzipan. (Hey, Sam had been, like, _twelve_ at the time - anything good, he'd compared to cake.) Dean Winchester: Sex Ed 101. They hadn't even had The Talk, yet - but Sam had gone back up to his room and jerked off like it was the end of the world, and now that it actually _is_ the end of the world, maybe it's fate that Sam should find himself watching Dean again.

By accident. It's an accident. He isn't back any earlier than usual from his nightly hunt, or at least, he doesn't _think_ he is - but he's too early for Dean and Cas, obviously, because Sam can hear them fucking from out _here_, with his key a bare five centimeters away from the door, shaking in his hand.

They're. They're _in_ there, and how dare they - Sam needs a place to sleep, _too_, thank you very much, and - fuck, don't they even have the sense to close the _curtains_ properly? There's this gap right by the corner of the bedroom window, and Sam doesn't know how his feet have carried him there, but even though the gap's too small, it's _enough_, big enough, and Sam sees - Sam sees -

He doesn't want to see. He _can't_. But he _does_, because that's what Sam's been doing, his entire life - watching his brother do all the things he was supposed to do, but failed to. Get the girls; go with Dad; sacrifice his life; earn the faith of a goddamn _angel_; be chosen to save the world. Everything. Dean always does everything _first_, and makes it kind of pointless for Sam to even _try_, because everything Dean does, he does beautifully.

Like he's doing this.

He's - Dean's doing this. Having this done to him. This act of _worship_, because it's not - it's not _fucking_, of course it isn't, because this is _Cas_, and he probably doesn't even understand the _concept_. This is _prayer_, and it's closer to what Sam had with Jess, some nights, than it is to anything Sam's ever imagined Dean being capable of having. And that stings, too - that sign of having failed his brother yet again, of having failed to _believe_ in him, to expect of him what Cas so easily does. And because Castiel has the courage to expect it, he _gets_ it, in the arch of Dean's neck and the breath-tremble of his mouth, and the slow, slow pumping of Dean's hips, in and out of Cas's fist. He gets it in sweat-smooth curve of Dean's back against his chest, in the fixture of Dean's hand on his wrist, not forceful or urging at all but _patient_, just resting there, thumb stroking back and forth, like Cas can take his time with Dean and do whatever he wants to him, and Dean'll _wait_, without questioning, without asking, because he _trusts_ Cas to give it to him when he really needs it, to save him when he needs it, like Cas saved him from hell. _Fuck_.

And when Cas's eyes snap up to meet Sam's, through the window, it isn't even a surprise - those eyes, blue-lit and all-knowing, unnervingly unruffled. Like Sam's watching Cas read _scripture_, or something, not anything remotely inappropriate or sinful or non-angelic at all. And hell, maybe Cas _is_ reading scripture, because his lips are moving in a quiet, almost subsonic hum against Dean's throat, and his fingers _are_ reading Dean, every twitch and gasp and stutter of pulse, and Cas looks away from Sam again like Sam is _forgettable_, a piece of goddamn _furniture_, because Dean is so much more beautiful and so much more incandescent: silver-limned in the curtained moonlight, shifting like a sinuous thing, a glistening ribbon of muscle and living ligament in Castiel's fingers, moving to the rhythm of them, mouth open and making quietly _certain_ noises, not lost or hurt at all, like most humans in the throes of lust, but _found_, and _kept_, because Castiel's keeping him, making him feel safe, feel whole, like nothing else has after what Alastair did to him, and Dean's - Dean's finally _home_, he's finally -

_Fuck you_, Sam thinks, or maybe, _oh God_, but that would be blasphemy, so he stumbles away from the window and down the motel's stairs, out into the blisteringly cold parking lot and back into the Impala, and grips the steering wheel and almost imagines that it can _take_ him somewhere, somewhere that isn't here, but he knows that it never will.

So he just sits there, for another hour, maybe two, maybe three - until the cold seeps into his skin and into his bones and maybe even into the Enochian script that curls around his ribs, bright as a spark of barbed wire to the demon in him. He waits, like he's waited for Dean before, like he'll wait for Dean again, until the thrum of the overhead streetlight and the dark, jagged gleam of the surrounding gravel merge into something singular and loud, a species of deafening silence, that fills all the spaces within Sam that blood never could.

* * *

**fin.**


End file.
